Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  He found a great peace for up on a distant hump of the downs among scabious and trefoil. There, by the iron railings of a dewpond, he would lie and gaze into the sky and lose himself for a while in the hurrying blanket white clouds above him; until one afternoon he found a solitary duck, swimming in rapid crazy circles upon the small pond, and instantly he was reminded of his life with Ella, alone and yet never alone; and the hill peak, too, became closed to him.

  *

  Nowhere seemed closed to Elizabeth and Terence during those weeks. They went everywhere together. At first, their meetings were designed to discuss ‘the Bernard situation’ – the meetings of two hard, competent minds, content to accept their ultimate antipathy in a common effort to solve a practical problem. As the weather was fine, it seemed foolish to be stuck indoors, and, when the rainy days followed, it was somehow an additional impetus to competent discussion to brave the wet in long rides on the tops of buses or in the river steamers to Greenwich or Hampton Court. Elizabeth played truant from her office and Terence let important contacts go unheeded. There was so much to report, of someone’s colourful story of Bernard’s sex life and of someone else’s chance remark that ‘Communists like Sands were at the root of a lot of the trouble’; there were discussions of how to counteract this rumour and how to give the lie to that; there were analyses of Bernard’s problems, which inevitably led to reminiscence. Imperceptibly the discussion changed to more personal questions – of whether Terence was really ‘queer’ and if so, why; of whether Elizabeth need be bound by her childhood unhappiness. Terence would point out how much happier she was when she was not being ‘bright’, and wasn’t that nice? Elizabeth would retaliate with how much happier he was when he was not being ‘camp’ and wasn’t that nice? They enjoyed analysing and converting each other; and they delighted in pointing out that each was far too tough and sophisticated to be really influenced by anything but clear thinking and hard, enlightened self-interest. They enjoyed, too, showing each other little-known aspects of London – an Italianate Methodist Chapel in Lewisham, a strange formal garden in Highbury, open to the public but visited by no one, the arty horror of Church Street and the chic horror of Beauchamp Place, Ethical Churches and Christadelphian meeting houses – and they found even greater pleasure in visiting all the tourists’ haunts that neither had ever seen before – the Elgin Marbles, Frogmore, the Dome of Discovery, the armour at the Tower, Kensington Palace, above all the Fun Fair. In a little while they saw the conventional ‘romance’ aspect of these jaunts, and then they enjoyed guying it. ‘Thanks for the memory,’ Terence would sing, ‘of sounds of London’s bells and queues at Sadler’s Wells. How lovely it’s been.’ Elizabeth was a little slower in assuming a mood, but soon she was responding with ‘The rush hour buses passing Hyde Park Corner, a visit to observe the Zoo’s new fauna, a quick look round Pontings, these foolish things remind me of you,’ only she tended to continue her parodies to a point where Terence became slightly embarrassed. Yet now that the barriers he had so long set up against whimsy were breaking down, he seemed almost to delight in the embarrassment that followed.

  After their first night together, Terence said, ‘Darling Elizabeth, you can’t imagine what a relief it is that sex has at last reared its ugly head,’ and Elizabeth agreed. For Terence, at first at any rate, it was strangely pleasant to feel released from the need

  to disguise guilty motives of main chance by shows of technical efficiency. For Elizabeth it was wonderful to be free from the melancholy secretiveness of her previous relations with married men – ‘I might have known,’ said Terence, when she told him, ‘it would be a lot of dreary father-figures that have messed your life up.’ – Yet it was not ultimately sex that gave them their fullest content, but the first sense of equality in age and affection. They guyed the ‘sweetheart’ aspect of their intimacy, but for Elizabeth, certainly, the mockery was only a self-protection against an onrush of love so deep that she was afraid of it. At first it was Terence who insisted on holding hands in the cinema and the park. ‘Stop being so damned refined,’ he said. ‘What’s the good of walking out if you’re going to spoil it all by being stuffy and Kensington.’ But it was Elizabeth who refused to smoke a cigarette unless it was shared with Terence; riding on the top of a bus, with her head on his shoulder, she would take the cigarette from his mouth and puff at it, her eyes closed with happiness, until Terence really began to wonder if he would ever smoke a cigarette of his own again. ‘Don’t act so common, dear,’ he would say, but Elizabeth would only giggle in reply, and then, ‘Oh dear! I never knew a girl could be so happy,’ she would sigh. Arrived at Kew Gardens or Hampstead Heath, they would feed the jostling, snapping ducks with bits of cake and buns from a paper bag. Lying there, watching the glittering green heads and wagging tails, they felt themselves part of the holiday crowd around them, free at last from the rack of self-advancement and of self-pity, free at last from solitude.

  *

  Eric’s solitude, as he stood among the gobbling ‘bolshies’, seemed complete. The return from Vardon Hall had unleashed all the dormant hostility and jealousy which Alan’s injured pride had suppressed since he came home from the War to find his young brother securely embedded in the heart of his mother’s affections. Throughout Alan’s childhood, Mrs Craddock’s aloof beauty and triumphant femininity had raised her above filial devotion to an adoration that he felt to be beyond word or gesture. She was woman enthroned, the symbol that urged man on to face all dangers, the purity that saved him from all cheapening act or thought. Isolated in his seriousness from his contemporaries, he had woven a picture of the deep love between them – the deeper because it had never been uttered – only to find that Eric’s easy acceptance of her, his very despised effeminacy, had broken down the exalted temple and the holy places, and built of them a cosy, gossiping women’s parlour, from which an ordinary man like himself felt excluded. What he could do by hard work and decent living to win her regard he had done, but the fires of resentment had continued to smoulder.

  The blaze when it broke out on the return from Vardon was fierce and crackling. He had seen enough and heard enough, Alan cried, to know just what sort of midden Eric had got himself into. He only hoped, he said, that Eric realized the sort of way that kind of thing ended up. Oh! he knew all the cant about art and self-expression that people of that kind used to excuse themselves, but when Eric was a little older he would see the difference between second-rate poseurs and people of real greatness. Habit, he warned Eric, was the most dangerous master. Could he not see the tragedy of Sands’ own life; every word of his speech showed it, let alone all that hysterical mob of fellow-travellers and God knew what that had gathered round him. It had really been an eye-opener to him, he said, to see what went on, when he thought of the distinguished men who apparently were either too cynical or too flabby to protest. Such a cleansing of the stables as he could see was needed, no wonder the nation was so slack. What he disliked most, he declared, was the pretence of highmindedness that people like Sands adopted.

  If Alan appeared to forget his progressive standpoint entirely in his anger, Eric’s gaiety, frivolity, and irreverence also seemed to vanish. If Alan had so little human sympathy, so little understanding of anyone’s nature but his own, it was disgraceful, Eric shouted, that he should have any authority over youth. It was typical of anyone so completely small-minded, so totally without sensitivity, that he should be frightened of men like Bernie who lived by a larger code. He could hardly expect that anyone so essentially self-centred and mean as his brother would appreciate that one could care so deeply about someone greater than oneself that one would give them anything, yes anything, that would make life happier and fuller for them.

  The louder they both shouted and the more red in the face they got the higher the moral plane they felt it necessary to ascend to, until only physical violence could have brought them down to earth. Since a certain sense of dignity still restrained them from a return of nursery fighting, ther
e was nothing left for them but to retire to their respective rooms in sulks.

  Mrs Craddock behaved superbly. She never allowed the slightest gesture to show her awareness of the scene, though she came into the room once or twice during the quarrel to fetch a book, her glasses, and the Radio Times. But her finest hour came later in the evening when each of her sons in turn tried to enlist her allegiance.

  ‘Eric, darling,’ she said, when her younger son attempted to raise the subject as they were washing up after dinner, ‘don’t look so pompous. It’s all right for Alan, darling, because, ssh! don’t tell a soul,’ and she put her finger to her lips, ‘he feels important and grand and dutiful, but it doesn’t do for you and me, we’re much too irresponsible. Tell me all about this silly business, if you really have to, but don’t expect me to be serious about it,’ she put her arm round Eric’s waist. ‘I value the gay relationship we have far too much to let it get involved in a lot of huffing and puffing about nothing. You see, darling, how selfish I am,’ she ended. ‘Whenever people start to look important about themselves, I always begin to giggle.’

  With Alan, however, she didn’t giggle at all. She looked up so seriously from her pillow when, pacing male and clumsy about her bedroom – the very temple of feminine delicacy to him – her elder son began to speak his heart. Then, patting her rose-coloured quilt, she indicated to him that he might sit there. ‘I can’t have you prowling, darling, however serious it is,’ she cried.

  ‘It is pretty serious,’ Alan replied. ‘I don’t even know whether I can talk to you about it.’

  Mrs Craddock took his hand and looked very steadily into his eyes. After a pause, she said very deliberately, ‘Then don’t. Not because it isn’t probably something that I don’t know already, but because our relationship is built on trust, Alan. Trust and silence. There are so many things we don’t talk about, you and I. Things that perhaps we couldn’t talk about without twisting ourselves into shapes we don’t want to be. But that doesn’t matter. I know, and I think and hope you know, that we’re on the same side, on the side of decent, clean things.’ Then, kissing her son on the cheek, ‘Now go to bed, darling,’ she said, ‘and remember that Eric’s awfully young, and you know as well as I do, with all your experience, that young people need leading, not driving.’

  It was a chastened, serious, more progressive Alan who began ‘leading’ Eric the next day. He was afraid, he said, that he must have seemed very pompous the day before. Eric must not misunderstand him. He had not read Bernard Sands’ books; but he had heard enough of them and seen enough of the man to realize how easily he could command a younger fellow’s devotion. Sands was clearly a man of outstanding ability and unusual breadth of understanding, though personally he could not help feeling, a tragic figure. In any case, he had not lived twenty-eight years without realizing that we were not all cast in the same mould. He had only been trying to say – and making a mess of it, he was afraid – that perhaps this was not the happiest road for Eric to follow. It might seem all right now, but one had to think of twenty years hence. Everyone went through certain phases – when they were at school, for example. But one had to grow up. He offered to pay for a psychoanalyst for Eric, if that would help. He had been immensely struck, he said, in the Army, with the number of first-rate men who shared his brother’s difficulty – interesting and often good men, but a bit more highly strung than the rest – and there was no doubt at all, he assured Eric, of the immense good that psychiatry had done for them. He ended by reminding Eric how remarkably lucky they were in the mother they had – so extraordinarily unusual and courageous, so well worth trying to live up to. He felt sure that Eric, who understood her in many ways far better than he could – it cost Alan a lot to say this – would be the last person to wish to add to the pretty grim way in which life had treated her.

  Unfortunately Mimi’s advice had affected her younger son as much as her elder. Eric was determined not to repeat his mood of solemnity. He thanked Alan very much – he was, in fact, quite sincerely moved – Alan mustn’t take him so seriously. He often doubted if he had what was usually called a personality yet. Certainly he had not acquired any fixed aim or way of life. He was probably, he giggled, going through what was called ‘a phase’. As Alan himself had said, we were all very different. He supposed that he had that exceedingly bogus thing – an artistic temperament. In any case, he had got to work it out for himself. No doubt he would find what he believed they called his feet in time. Once more he giggled. He ended by agreeing with his brother that so unusual, so lovely a mother – he inserted this adjective as his own personal appreciation of Mimi – must be their first consideration and care. For fear of hurting Alan, he forbore to say that he also believed her to be completely aware of his way of living.

  They parted with mutual respect and an even greater misunderstanding of one another.

  It was then that Eric, in panic, began to bombard Bernie with letters and phone calls. From public call-boxes in the lunch hour and secretively from the bookshop he rang the London flat and got no reply. He hesitated before ringing Vardon, for fear of causing Bernie domestic difficulties. It was only after he had received no answer to three letters that he felt justified in risking Bernie’s peace. But the contact only added to his anxiety. Yes, Bernie said, he had received Eric’s letters. He was deeply ashamed not to have answered them, but a reply was on its way. His affection was not in any way altered but, as Eric would see from the letter when he got it, there was much to consider besides affection, or rather much to consider within affection. In short Eric must follow his own judgement most carefully. In answer to Eric’s pressing questions, he added that he saw no reason why any of the plans about London should be changed, any help he had promised to give he would give – and be glad to give, he corrected with a break in his voice – but Eric alone could decide.

  The letter, when it came, had clearly been written after this telephone conversation.

  My dearest Eric, it read, you are right to be angry with me for not replying to you, but you are not right to be anxious. If you want my help in getting to London and in studying, you have it. You know that. If you want my very deep affection, you have it. You know that too. I cannot, at the moment, give you guidance or counsel. You have complained once or twice of my moralizing influence. You were quite right. My influence must of necessity be ‘moral’, I thought that my motives too were ‘moral’, now I have no such faith. Yours is a difficult enough life without the added danger of my motives; so I think, my dear, you must avoid that danger. I hope, but with no conviction, that I am simply ‘ill’ – sickness of the soul is a convenient piece of high-sounding cant – if so, I shall know that I am well again when I can take your curious mixture of irreverence and happiness and seriousness as they should be taken – with gratitude. Until then, rely on them to form your own judgement. I would like to say something about your mother, but motive forbids.

  With all my love,

  Bernie.

  Eric had derived little comfort from this letter, less still, perhaps, from Mrs Craddock’s determined easiness, the gaiety with which she met his depressed silence and mooching each evening after work.

  And so, as he stood by the gobbling ‘bolshies’, he felt none of the usual thrill at their gay, glittering, shimmering colours. He was alone, the fair Antinous, careless of the ibises to whose warm scarlet plumage he had once been wont to draw the Emperor’s attention, intent now only upon old Nile itself. Soon there would be but busts and statues and the grief of an Emperor. The tears of Hadrian would be too late, though he watered the whole world from Britain to Scythia. Damn Hadrian, and damn Bernie who by his moralizing and the mocking influence he was now so selfishly withdrawing had cut off even the refuge of daydreams.